The full story

June 27, 2006|ART SACKLER

The Tribune's article "Marshall County hotel tax suit filed" (June 10) only covered one side of the story about the lawsuit against online travel companies. There is another side that the Interactive Travel Services Association, which serves as a voice for the online travel industry, believes your readers should know. In filing suit, Marshall County officials bypassed their own procedures for determining whether tax is owed, and instead let high-priced outside trial lawyers lead them to a "sue first-ask questions later" approach. In a similar suit filed in Philadelphia, the judge recently threw the case out, and admonished the city of Philadelphia for following the same approach. That judge directed Philadelphia to follow its own procedures before going to court. This suit is wrong on the facts and the law. It is not correct that tax is being recovered on the gross and remitted on the net. The online travel companies do not buy, rent or resell hotel rooms. They charge fees for their service of setting up Web sites that enable you to book your hotel room yourself. Those fees are not for the rooms -- only for their services, and not subject to hotel tax. Marshall County officials would have learned all this if they had taken the time to talk with the companies first. Art Sackler is executive director of Interactive Travel Services Association in Bethesda, Md.